Self-Made is an account of how we began to think of ourselves as divine beings in an increasingly disenchanted world and about the consequences — political, economic, and social — of that thinking. These consequences have both liberated us from some forms of tyranny and placed us into the shackles of others. It is a story, in other words, about human beings doing what we have always done: trying to solve the mystery of how to live as beings both dazzlingly powerful and terrifyingly vulnerable, thrust without our consent into a world whose purpose and meaning we may never be able to truly know.
The publisher’s blurb describes Self-Made as “a series of chronological biographical essays on famous (and infamous) ‘self-creators’ in the modern Western world”, and essentially, it reads like author Tara Isabella Burton is presenting a lecture series on our society’s evolution from enforced (cultural and religious) conformity to the pressures we feel today to each be striking individuals with marketably unique brands. Each chapter tells the stories of those who pushed the limits of what was acceptable in their day, and from these individual biographies to Burton’s overall thesis, I found this to be totally fascinating and readable. If I had a complaint it would be that this felt too comprehensive — there are so many stories here, spanning centuries, that I find it hard to sum up succinctly — but that’s hardly a complaint at all (if this had been a lecture series, I would have enjoyed taking it in over several weeks or months, but as it was, I still enjoyed reading this slowly.) Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.
All of us have inherited the narrative that we must shape our own path and place in this life and that where and how we were born should not determine who and what we will become. But we have inherited, too, this idea’s dark underbelly: if we do not manage to determine our own destiny, it means that we have failed in one of the most fundamental ways possible. We have failed at what it means to be human in the first place.
In opposition to Thomas Aquinas’ Prime Mover theory (which stated that in addition to creating the world, God had immutably “determined the shape of human life, including rank, blood, and station”), German philosopher Immanuel Kant would later write that the Enlightenment was “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity”; no longer would men be “grasping at the leading strings” to follow the way of their parents. The Renaissance saw men (and it was always men with the opportunities) determined to reinvent themselves. This ranged from notorious self-creator Albrecht Dürer (“hailed as many things: one of the Renaissance’s finest artists, the inventor of the selfie, the world’s first celebrity self-promoter”) to Baldassare Castiglione (whose 1528 book The Courtier served as a guide for those who wanted to learn the art of “sprezzatura” and serve the royal courts) and Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince: a guidebook for the self-reinvention of would-be rulers. Burton shares the French freedom-seeking philosophies of Montaigne, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the Marquis de Sade. She writes of Regency England and the “bon ton” of public figures like Beau Brummell and Oscar Wilde, and throughout, makes the point that in Europe, the quest for self-creation had an “aristocratic” bent: anyone could become princely, if not an actual prince, with the right attitude. (Burton intriguingly points out that this attitude inevitably led to the fascism of the Twentieth Century, with figures like Gabriele D’Annunzio, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini peddling “the fantasy of superhuman specialness to a population all too willing to treat their neighbors as subhuman”.)
If the social Darwinists had envisioned human progress as a linear march toward perfection, then the advertisers of the early twentieth century helped clarify what, exactly, that perfection looked like: a whole nation of stars, all expressing their own singular, unique personality by using the same few products.
On the other hand, the quest for self-creation in America had a more “democratic” bent: From Frederick Douglass’ pulling-up-of-the-bootstraps get-to-work philosophy to Phineas Quimby’s New Thought movement (“you can think yourself to wealth”), the American Dream, from the beginning, was thought to be attainable by anyone (and those who failed to attain great wealth had only themselves to blame: you only need to work harder; think harder). Between Hollywood and Madison Avenue, “It” (the ineffable sprezzatura and bon ton of earlier ages) was presented as desirable and attainable — for a price, anyway. And this attitude inevitably led to the rise of self-promoters like Donald Trump and the Kardashians, and today, the belief that anyone could become an internet sensation if they only found their niche and marketed themselves properly (Burton writes that “‘social media star’ is now the fourth most desirable career for contemporary teenagers”, and that just doesn’t sound attainable or psychologically healthy to my aged sensibilities.)
The story of self-creation, at its core, is not only a story about capitalism or secularism or the rise of the middle class or industrialization or political liberalism, although it touches upon all these phenomena and more. It is, rather, a story about people figuring out, together, what it means to be human. It is a story about trying to work out which parts of our lives — both those parts chosen and those parts we did not choose — are really, authentically us, and which parts are mere accidents of history, custom, or circumstance. It is, in other words, a story about people asking, and answering, and asking once again the most fundamental question human beings can ask: Who am I, really?
Burton concludes that the modern day answer to “Who am I, really” — “whoever I want to be” — is dangerous because it not only disregards very real limits to outward change and social mobility but it also discounts the fundamental truths (shaped by the environment, community, secret longings) we hold within ourselves: and why should the outer presentation be considered more authentically “real” than the inner experience? It’s undeniable that shaking off the yoke of Mediaeval-style societal/religious control is a boon for mankind, but why has public acclaim become the only marker of self-worth? Burton covers many more thinkers and their lives than I can recount in a review — making it slightly challenging to share her thesis and its proofs — but I can say that I loved every bit of this.
